This week, Orlando welcomes Microsoft customers, execs and assorted hangers-on
(like the motley
Redmond
crew), and as usual there are more press releases
than Orlando area theme parks.
Today's
keynoter was Bob Muglia, senior VP of the server and tools business. Muglia's
theme was "Dynamic IT for the People-Ready Business."
I read reports of his speech but I can't for the life of me understand what
Microsoft means by "dynamic." Don't get me started on "people-ready,"
a vacuous marketing term if there ever was one.
Digging deeper, "dynamic" really seems to mean "well-managed,"
and this management just happens to come from Microsoft. When systems are well-managed,
they're easier to change, upgrade, tweak and add services to, so I guess this
could kind of make them dynamic.
We'll be diving more deeply into individual new products in the next few newsletters,
but here's a quick rundown:
- There are new versions of Forefront security, including a unified system
for clients, servers and the edge of the network.
- There was a formal announcement of the name of the next version of Visual
Studio, due next year. Get this: It's gonna be called "Visual Studio
2008"!
- IIS 7.0 was announced and will be bundled
with Windows 2008 Server Core. This seems like the perfect Microsoft antidote
to the Linux/Apache duo.
Google Strengthens Software Development Hand
Google is dipping its well-heeled toes into the software development market
with a new set of tools that will allow the building of apps
that can actually run offline (gasp!).
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Posted by Doug Barney on June 04, 20070 comments
Microsoft has been wishy-washy about the Open Document format promoted by the
OpenOffice backers. It supports the file format through translators, but not
as a native format in Office 2007, which uses OpenXML instead.
Last week, Microsoft gave Open Doc another endorsement when it voted
to make the format an ANSI standard. I'd still like to see tighter integration
with Office, though.
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Posted by Doug Barney on May 21, 20070 comments
In an effort to keep its next generation of virtualization from slipping further,
Microsoft is
delaying
a raft of key features
.
Viridian (which, besides being a codename, is a real word for the color blue/green)
will lose the ability to move a virtual machine that's running to another box.
Hot swapping is also getting the cold shoulder. I bet VMware engineers are breathing
real sighs of relief.
Posted by Doug Barney on May 14, 20070 comments
A little more than a year from now, ICANN is expected to
release
a bevy of new 'Net names
. I'm not sure what new suffixes it'll approve,
but suffice to say Web squatters will be snapping up the most common names and
selling them to the highest bidder.
Posted by Doug Barney on May 14, 20070 comments
Here's a shocker: It seems that "Longhorn," cool as it sounds, will
not be the name of the next Windows Server.
Brace yourselves! Longhorn will be called "Windows Server 2008."
Microsoft won't comment on the name, mistakenly
posted on its Web site, but this is far from a surprise.
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Posted by Doug Barney on May 14, 20070 comments
SanDisk is working with Microsoft on a
new
generation of flash drives
that make it easier to take your computing environment
with you.
Many smart IT folks long ago figured out how to bring their files and applications
anywhere they go. In the old days, some even toted around hard drives and slapped
them into PCs at remote offices or at home.
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Posted by Doug Barney on May 14, 20070 comments
Microsoft's plan to take over the anti-virus/security software from those who
created it has moved into overdrive with the
release
of Forefront Client Security
.
I've been critical of this move on the grounds that partners -- including Symantec,
McAfee and Sunbelt -- together saved Windows from the unrelenting peril that
is viruses. Once they showed the way, it was easy for Microsoft to do the exact
same thing, competing with the very vendors that helped keep Windows running
in the first place! We tackled this and other issues in our January cover story
"Unfair
Fight."
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Posted by Doug Barney on May 03, 20070 comments
Versions of Windows have always suffered and benefited from the use of old code.
The benefit is backward compatibility. The suffering comes from a failure to
move fully forward, slow performance and security holes.
After Trustworthy Computing, many of us thought that Vista would be different.
And in most cases it is. But not every hunk of code is new and that leaves pieces
of Vista vulnerable.
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Posted by Doug Barney on May 03, 20070 comments
Microsoft Research has gotten many a bum rap from the business press. Journos
who are fixated on stock prices and product launches just don't understand why
Redmond would invest billions researching "a best-first alignment algorithm
for automatic extraction of transfer mappings from bilingual corpora" or
do a "comparative study of discriminative methods for re-ranking LVCSR
N-best hypotheses in domain adaptation and generalization." (When you put
it that way, I'm not so sure either!)
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Posted by Doug Barney on May 03, 20071 comments
The word "Ubuntu" may mean a universal bond that unites humanity,
but these days it also refers to the tight ties between the Ubuntu desktop version
of Linux and Dell, which will
preload
the OS onto PCs and laptops
for any customers who ask.
Desktop Linux has long been maligned for its lack of driver support. Nowadays,
that rap is also given to Vista.
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Posted by Doug Barney on May 02, 20070 comments
Love is a wonderful thing, except when it clouds your judgment and makes it
impossible for you to let go of what you've already lost. And no one loved their
computers more than the owners of Commodore Amigas.
The fact that Commodore went utterly bankrupt and that the machines have been
pretty much dead for over a decade didn't stop these users from dreaming, and
the true believers from plotting a comeback.
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Posted by Doug Barney on May 02, 20073 comments